


When It Rains

by mirvly



Series: Silver Lining [1]
Category: John Wick (Movies)
Genre: John being protective of a small child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 18:25:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19115209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirvly/pseuds/mirvly
Summary: Eight year old Millie has only just escaped the men who killed her parents. When she's hiding on the playground, a strange man and his dog appear just in time to protect her.





	When It Rains

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my pals Cat, Em, and Sam for reading this over and inflating my ego. Also, John's dog is named Bleu because that's the name Em (johnsbleu) came up with and I fully support it, and you all should too.

  

It’s raining.

It has been ever since Millie arrived at the playground four hours ago. She’s drenched, and even though it’s summer, she’s shivering in just her floral dress and sneakers. Her mom always wanted her to wear sandals, but dirt always gets in between her toes. She likes her sneakers, and they have sparkles, anyway.

Now, Millie thinks, it doesn’t matter what she’s wearing. Her _everything_ is cold.

She huddles under the jungle gym, a plastic platform above her head, hugging her knees to her chest. She misses her mom. And her dad. She’s little, and she doesn’t know much, but she does know somehow that they aren’t coming back. Those scary men came and took them away, and Millie only just got away before they could grab her, too.

She doesn’t know the neighbourhood very well, but she does know the playground. So she ran as fast as her little legs could carry her down the road to the park, and she’s been under the jungle gym ever since.

Even over the patter of the rain, Millie can hear the footsteps coming. She has good hearing; sometimes she asks if her mom can hear something, and she can’t, but Millie can. Now she hears footsteps, and she sees big feet walking towards the jungle gym from the sidewalk. And she thinks, _oh no, maybe the bad men have come for me._

The feet stop in front of her, and Millie shivers as she stares at the man’s shiny shoes and black pants. He isn’t wet like her; she can hear the rain hitting his umbrella where she can’t see.

He squats down, and there’s his face. He’s old, she realizes. Not old like grandpa, but old like her daddy. He has some grey in his beard. She stares back at him, and he doesn’t smile, but for some reason, his eyes look friendly. Her mom used to say to never talk to strangers, but when you don’t have a mom anymore, who else are you supposed to talk to?

“Hullo,” she says quietly, and then sniffs, because she is really, really cold.

“Hi there,” says the man, and his voice is low, and quiet, but not scary. “Are you all alone?”

Millie nods slowly. “How come you’re walking in the rain?” she asks, because she knows why she’s here, but she doesn’t see why anyone else should be in the rain like this. Playing in the rain is supposed to give you a cold.

“I’m walking my dog.” He whistles suddenly, so sharply that Millie jumps a little bit. There’s the jingle of a collar, and paws on the wet dirt, and then there’s a grey dog loping towards her. She’s not scared of dogs, but this dog is kind of scary-looking.

The dog starts licking her face right away, and she can’t help but giggle a little, because it tickles.

“Bleu.” The dog jumps away instantly to sit beside its owner, and the man scratches behind its ears affectionately. “He doesn’t bite.”

“His name is Blue? Like the colour?” Millie asks.

“Sort of.” The man smiles a little, and it makes him look a lot more friendly. “My name is John.”

“I’m Melissa Gabriella St. James, but everyone calls me Millie.”

“Where are your parents, Millie?”

Millie knows it’s silly to cry, but it’s been four whole hours since she’s seen her mom and dad, and she’s starting to miss them a lot. The thought of never seeing them again makes her heart feel funny. So she cries a little, but she wipes away the tears fast so that the man named John might not see. He pretends he doesn’t notice, so she likes him even more.

“Did something happen to your parents?”

Millie shrugs, sniffing, and a tiny sob escapes her as she says, “M-Maybe.”

The second the word leaves her mouth, there’s a loud noise that makes Millie scream—a sharp _bang_ that seems to hang in the air for several long moments as she sits there, hands clapped over her ears, wide-eyed as John stands up and spins on his heel.

A voice shouts, “Back away from the girl!” and Millie starts to cry again, because she recognizes that voice, and it’s the one that belongs to the man who ripped her mom away back home in their kitchen.

And the dog, Bleu, is suddenly not very friendly at all as it sprints towards the voice. Millie peeks out from under the jungle gym and sees a cluster of men, all wearing dark suits, standing at the edge of the playground. The one at the front is holding a gun—she’s seen them on TV, but never in real life—but he drops it when Bleu jumps on him and tackles him to the ground.

John has a gun in his hand, and Millie has no idea when it got there. But he quickly shoots several times, and she’s glad her hands were already over her ears, because it’s _loud_. Three of the men fall down, and a fourth one is still wrestling with Bleu. John lowers the gun and fiddles with it for a moment, putting shiny gold bullets into it.

The fifth man is running for cover behind a tree, and he’s shouting, “Shit! That’s John Wick!”

“It can’t be John fucking Wi—”

John’s gun goes off again, and the man under Bleu goes very still. Millie can’t even stop to wonder about that, because now John’s aiming at the tree. Millie thinks, _he can’t possible shoot through a tree, can he?_

The gun goes off and the man yells as he falls out from behind the tree, clutching his foot. His toe had been sticking out at the bottom by the roots, and now that he’s in plain view, John doesn’t hesitate to shoot him again. Millie closes her eyes and presses back against the jungle gym, wondering not for the first time that evening if she might be dreaming.

“Wake up, wake up, wake up,” she mutters to herself over and over.

“Millie.”

She opens her eyes, and John is crouching again, but he keeps glancing over his shoulder, even as he holds out one hand to her. She stares at it, terrified, because it was just holding a gun that killed five people.

“You should come with me.”

“Those men hurts my parents,” she cries. He might as well know. He killed them, after all.

“They won’t hurt anyone again,” he says.

He says it so softly that Millie doesn’t hesitate as she takes his hand. He pulls her up onto her feet, gripping her hand tightly, and she realizes that somehow, he managed to hold onto the umbrella this entire time. She huddles close to catch the shelter of the umbrella as Bleu returns to them, following at her heel. The dog almost comes up to her hip, so she leans over to pet him softly. He helped, after all.

John starts leading her back towards the sidewalk. She realizes she’s now following a man who she knows nothing about. But he must be okay, because he protected her from the men who wanted to hurt her. At least, she thinks they wanted to hurt her. She’ll never know for sure.

A car loudly rounds the corner onto the street where the park is, rumbling towards them. It screeches to a halt not too far away, and John lets go of her hand, reaching for his gun again.

“Millie, can you run?” he asks.

“Yes, but—”

“Good. You run, and you don’t stop. Take Bleu.”

There’s a bang, and Millie jumps. John points down the sidewalk, in the opposite direction she came from, so she doesn’t know where it leads. “Run,” he says again, and then he’s turning away, his gun going off, one bang after another.

So Millie runs.

Bleu runs beside her. Sometimes he gets a little too far ahead, but then he checks over his shoulder and slows down to wait for her. The gunfire fades a little as she runs, but she’s not a very fast runner, and it’s hard to see in the rain. She just hopes John doesn’t take too long. She wants him to catch up.

Somehow, suddenly, this man and his dog are the only two things she has in the world. And that’s not ideal, but it’s okay. Because Millie’s okay. She has John and Bleu.

And she’ll be okay as long as she has them.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> My tumblr is [dukecabooms.](http://dukecabooms.tumblr.com/)  
> My twitter is [keanusbf.](https://twitter.com/keanusbf)


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